The present invention generally provides methods and systems for facilitating the indexing and searching of content. More specifically, the present invention provides methods and systems for indexing and searching content maintained on media for storing digital video content, such as one or more digital video or digital versatile discs (“DVD”).
The World Wide Web (“Web”) provides a large collection of interlinked content items in various formats, including documents, images, video and other media content. As the Web has grown, the ability of users to search this collection and identify content items relevant or responsive to a given query has become increasingly important, with a number of search service providers existing to meet this need. In general, a search provider publishes a web page via which a user coupled to the Internet may submit a query indicating terms in which the user is expressing an interest. In response to the query, the search service generates and transmits to the user a list of links to Web pages or locations of content items that are relevant to the query, typically in the form of a search results page.
In addition to content being stored on the Internet, audio and video content are frequently stored using optical storage techniques on various storage media items, such as DVDs. A single DVD can store a significant quantity of data and may comprise one or more DVD Video Object files (“VOB”). Each DVD VOB file comprising a given DVD may store video and audio content, as well as subtitles, lyrics, credits, captions, titles, etc. For example, a given movie on a DVD may comprise a given number of DVD VOB files, each containing video and audio content, as well as corresponding subtitles and captions.
As DVDs grow in adoption and consumption, there is an increasing need to index DVD content so that a user may select to view an entire DVD from a collection of DVDs, as well as select one or more individual scenes, images, clips, etc., from a given DVD. Current techniques for locating a particular DVD or a particular item of content maintained on a given DVD require familiarity with the DVD title or other unique identifier associated with the DVD. Additionally, once a given DVD is identified or located, the content on the DVD must be traversed in order to locate a particular item of content on the DVD, such as a five second clip of a movie maintained on a DVD. For example, a viewer of a DVD movie that wishes to view a particular scene of the movie must traverse the one or more DVD VOB files comprising the DVD movie in order to locate the desired scene.
While the Internet provides users with the ability to search the Web for content including web pages, documents, files, etc., Internet users are currently unable to search for content maintained on the numerous commercially available DVDs. Though Internet users may search for information on a given DVD using identifiers such as title, actor(s) or genre, Internet users are unable to search for particular items of content within a given DVD, such as video clips, audio clips, thumbnails, specific scenes of a movie, etc.
As the popularity of DVDs increases, there is a growing need to index the content maintained on the numerous commercially available DVDs and to allow Internet users to search across such content. Current search techniques, however, fail to provide Internet users with the ability to locate specific items of content on a given DVD. In order to overcome shortcomings associated with existing searching techniques, embodiments of the present invention provide systems and methods for extracting and indexing the content maintained on a given DVD, and providing users of client devices with the ability to search among the indexed DVD content.